View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Central Archive at the University of Reading Dr Nicola Wilson, English Literature, University of Reading.
[email protected] This is the Green Open Access version of this article, the author final version after peer review corrections, in my own formatting (i.e. before editing and typesetting by the publisher). Required for REF. It has been accepted for publication as part of a special issue co-edited by Alex Peat and Claire Battershill on ‘Modernism and Collaboration’ for the journal Literature and History. 1 Nicola Wilson ‘So now tell me what you think!’: Sylvia Lynd's collaborative reading and reviewing and the work of an interwar middlewoman In a chapter on ‘Rose Macaulay: And Others’ in his Reminiscences of Affection (1968), publisher Victor Gollancz recalls Friday night gatherings at Robert and Sylvia Lynds’. ‘There was no one you might not meet there’ he wrote, ‘we looked forward eagerly to her Friday nights: these were almost weekly events when the season was right.’1 In the late 1920s and ’30s, Sylvia and Robert Lynd were at the centre of a literary circle in Hampstead that dominated contemporary letters. Among the ‘middlemen’ critiqued by Q. D. Leavis, and painted with the brush of the ‘professional scribbler’ according to Virginia Woolf, the Hampstead set were well-known writers and journalists, broadcasters, publishers, and reviewers. 2 Describing themselves as ‘Broadbrows’, in J. B. Priestley’s irreverent terms, the artists and